[La Flames Fan]

Originally Posted by Acey

To clarify, it was a legal flight and everything.

They did not call their ground handling company here in Calgary to see if they could be accommodated. Massive miscommunication, everybody here assumed they'd deplane in Edmonton and camp out up there. Instead they gassed up and departed Edmonton heading for Calgary.

There was a stretch on Saturday night where nothing could legally depart from Calgary due to the heavy snow. The length of time that you are legal to depart after de-icing is predicated on current precipitation, temperature, dewpoint, etc. This is called "holdover time". If the weather is so crappy that your holdover is shorter than the time it would take the plane to reach the runway... you're grounded. That's why everything was cancelling, and then AC and WS started running out of crews as they timed out so now holdovers are acceptable but there's nobody legal to fly.

Ground crews were so overloaded that there was nobody to tow planes off the gates that had cancelled earlier, but others kept arriving. So BA, assuming we'd have a gate for them on our brand new international terminal with 24 gates, file a flight plan and depart Edmonton.

YYC Tower looks out the window at the gongshow and sees not a single gate open on the international terminal, sees BA coming on the radar and calls Swissport, who are shocked that BA is inbound and quickly call the airport to see if any gate can be freed up. The airport then conferences with AC and WS, who say "not a chance". Both had planes waiting for ~3 hours waiting to get onto gate and about to become a CBC story.

ATC tells BA about the horror story, and BA goes back to YEG.

That is bonkers. Thanks for sharing that!